Sudden halt to CoViD-19 infections? It’s called ‘epidemic burst-fade-out’.

No, not the hair style!

“A well-behaved epidemic with build-up, peak, and fade out phases will be bell shaped….”–Deciphering Global Epidemics: Analytical Approaches to the Disease Records, 1998

“A wide epidemic burst forth suddenly and swept the country in one month.”–Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, Volume 21, 1924

“Only the natural interplay of transmission factors would determine when it would fade out…… ……Once the epidemic had burst upon the population….”–Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines, 1995

“Stochastic [random] effects may cause fade-out of an infectious disease in a population immediately after an epidemic outbreak.”–WKB theory of epidemic fade-out in stochastic populations, 2009. Note that ‘stochastic’ is a mathematical word that means ‘random’, in other words epidemiologists don’t really know why diseases suddenly stop sickening or killing people.

Epidemic burst fade-out describes the life-cycle of a new (novel) pathogen, usually a virus. It’s normal; a big bang at the beginning with people wondering where the hell it came from, then panic as it ravages the human hosts, then suddenly, without explanation, it’s gone.

CoViD-19 is not a disease, it is a pathogen. Disease is the result of a pathogen infecting a host (victim) when the environmental conditions favor the pathogen.

Pathogen=Bacterium, virus, or other microorganism that can cause disease.

For many old pathogens epidemiologists know, because of studying past disease outbreaks, what are the environmental conditions that favor those pathogens. When you are dealing with a novel (new) pathogen there is no way to know the perfect environmental conditions for it to strike, because there is no way to know that a novel pathogen exists. But even more amazing is that epidemiologists don’t understand why pathogens suddenly halt their disease causing rampages: “Some key outstanding questions remain unanswered, but we may discover the answers within the scope of current research studies. With those answers, we’ll not only inform disease prevention and control strategies, but we’ll also be able to shed light on our basic understanding of organismal evolution.”-Sarah McDonald, Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute

One important environmental factor that humans should be able to control (but don’t) is the level of physical and mental stress a potential host is experiencing. Disease outbreaks (burst) hit the big cities/metro areas first and hardest. So many people living so close together is enough to push the stress levels sky-high. Stress is not just negative, there is such a thing as positive stress. Anything that pushes your emotional system to a negative or positive extreme is stress. Many extroverted people love the big cities because of the physical closeness to other people, but pathogens also love the metro-closeness of humans. Metro areas are giant petri dishes creating the perfect environment for a pathogen to burst forth. (don’t forget that ever since the stress inducing Industrial Revolution there’s been a rapid acceleration of pathogens, also see The effects of industrialisation – Causes of illness and disease)

Perhaps staying calm, not getting excited or upset, is the best defense against pathogens. Like they said in the movie Airplane:

Arrogant humans think they are the ones who make diseases go away, through vaccines, treatments, social distancing, godly cleanliness, isolationism, as demonstrated by these news media articles:

How South Korea flattened the curve

Hong Kong has flattened the curve but can it stay the course?

These Two Studies Show How China Flattened The Coronavirus Curve